Friday Night Concert: “I Goes to Fight Mit Sigel”

“I Goes to Fight Mit Sigel” is a song that both celebrates and pokes gentle fun at the large number of German immigrants that served in the Union army. Sigel, of course, is Franz Sigel, a former Baden Army officer who had been caught up on the wrong side of the 1848 Revolution, and eventually became one of the German Forty-eighters who emigrated to the United States.

Sigel was one of Lincoln’s “political” generals, and though he didn’t make much of a field commander he was very successful in calling his fellow immigrants to Union arms, and in building the Army of the Potomac’s German regiments into a cohesive fighting unit. That is a significant contribution on its own.

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I often see Sigel referred to as a “political general.” If by that term we mean that politics helped propel him to his generalship, then of course he was. But nearly every West Pointer who rose to high command used political connections as a weapon of self-promotion.

Generally, when talking about native-born “political generals” we mean those generals who lacked a West Point education or service in the regular military. Banks, Sickles, and Butler are typical examples.

Sigel, however, was trained at a German military academy and had four years of professional military service. During the 1848 Revolution he led (briefly before being wounded) a force of citizen soldiers the size of a Union division. This would mean that his military career before the Civil War was not so different from that of native-born officers whom we do not dub as “political”.

Sigel had many failings as a field general and he should probably never have risen as high as he did, but neither should many West Pointers who were found wanting as division or corps commanders. He was, however, a trained soldier. His role in securing St. Louis for the Union in 1861, and the important (if exaggerated) part he played in the Union victory at Pea Ridge (1862) which secured Missouri, were major contributions to the war effort in the West.

Sigel’s rise to high rank was promoted by the German community, sometimes to the exclusion of other German officers like Peter Osterhaus. The German press did depict insults to Sigel as attacks on the German community. However, the use of politics and the press for promotion was hardly unknown among those deemed not to have been “political generals.”